3 July 2008

So… the new guided tour is up, and I’ve wasted thirty minutes of my life because when I downloaded it I didn’t notice there was a separate “See what’s new” video. I heartily recommend you download that one instead, even though it doesn’t seem to work here (the zip uncompresses with no error, but the video won’t play). Listening to iPhone Guy (whom I still don’t like) say “iPhone 3G” out loud all the time is annoying enough as it is, you don’t need to listen to the whole remake of the previous video regarding the functionalities that haven’t changed.

Observations:

isn’t it weird that the microphone is on the bottom with the speaker (and the infamous screws)? was that already the case?

the video indicates that you should press the Sleep button to activate; the Home button better still work (both buttons work on the current-gen iPhone, so I guess there’s no reason for it to change, but I can’t see either why they’d want to recommend using the Sleep button rather than Home)

I thought you were supposed to be able to display videos in portrait mode; either the rumor was wrong, or they realized that you may want to watch videos while lying sideways on your bed (and I wish they realized it applies to applications and web surfing too)

they haven’t fixed the problem of Ok, Cancel and Edit buttons being all over the place, which is a shame because that was the right moment to make an effort at MacOS-like consistency

Safari still sends you to the unoptimized desktop Google search, which makes no sense to me (but may be Google’s fault, actually, if the mobile version doesn’t process and subsidize referrals)

tapping the title bar to return to the top of a list is a great, subtle addition (hoping it’s standard across all apps, even third-party)

nothing has changed about the keyboard (except for Asian languages), including having to tap a small, moving target to deny a correction

guess there’s still no way to blacklist SMS spammers

turns out you can already two-finger tap to zoom out in Maps… and only in Maps, which is stupid

AIM is in the App Store, even though it wasn’t demonstrated again at the WWDC keynote